Property destruction and repression

I18

I love the black bloc going out and smashing corporate windows. I think that corporations perpetrate violence...as part of doing business and I think...it's totally justifiable to go and destroy their property, to act violently towards their property as a way of...shaking them up and [provoking] fear in them. But what does that do? It justifies the security state and it allows them to be even more dominant and predatory.

Managing dissent

I7

I think there's something to be said for keeping our internal struggles internal. Stephen Harper does that really well and that's not say again that we need to become authoritarian or hierarchical. It's just to say that if we're going to argue about whether we're libertarian or communist or something else we should not argue about that in the Chronicle Herald. We should not split our broader leftist movement apart publicly.

Crisis and opportunity

I12

I think along with the situation looking grim it's also maybe inspiring for some people who have already become politicized through some sort of radical resistance. I've often had the conversation with people who will say that they can't wait for the situation to get worse. As things become more desperate more people tend to seek other options for change and maybe they're seeing current vehicles for change as just not even an option anymore. Seeing other places in the world like Italy, the UK, Tunisia, Nigeria having large...uprising[s is]...inspiring.

A revolving door of resistance

I12

I feel like it's a revolving door of resistance where people are...doing stuff and they leave or people become disgruntled with it and then [even though] more people...are becoming politicized, they're not necessarily taking it a step further and really trying to push that agenda of active resistance and direct resistance against the state. [My] frustration with that is the lack of people who really want to get involved but I also have to remind myself that the place where I am at right now has taken fifteen years [for me to get to].

Struggling past isolation

I9

I think some of the most significant barriers right now...have to do with the feeling of being really isolated, separated, disconnected….I think that's a huge barrier and I think somehow that has to change. This will involve people actually fighting to change those conditions that are pushing us around. We can't be pushed around so much, so we somehow have to hold our ground and that would require, actually, direct challenges to things like rent, to control over living spaces, to control over work spaces. It's the only way we can avoid being thrown around.

Activism and marginality

I9

Just looking at our immediate context right here in Halifax...looking at...the organizations that people have to fight through right now, the only ones that we see around us are these unions that right now are pretty backwards….[T]hey don't really fight anything except legal strikes which are almost nothing these days, small windows, pickets that aren't really challenging the company. I think for me it matters who is showing up, who are the people that are involving themselves and I'm seeing the activist community, a loose knit group of people involved in different NGOs in the city, people involved in student activism, that are showing up at all these different events but these aren't the actual body of workers that are out there. This isn't like a working class movement and if it's not a working class movement it doesn't really have the potential to transform conditions in our society.

Reimagining development

I31

To what ends are we growing this economy? I think there's sort of three fundamental objectives of development in the twenty-first century: low carbon because of climate change, adapting to climate change, [and] reconciling some of the differences that exist within the current system. We need low carbon development and we need to create food security, energy security, and robust, resilient systems that people will be able to provide for their needs, and provide for their families, and so on. It's pretty simple. It's not growing the economy, because that's what got us into this mess in the first place.

The meaning of ‘radical’

I15

I don't...think that being radical is necessarily about having a project about how the world should be or about how we can change it but is always about understanding that from our most individual and most intimate and personal relations all the way up to the most impersonal and macro social relations there's something wrong here and that it's a change at all levels that's going to be required if we want to live in a world where we're free and we have a certain level of autonomy and equality. Do I consider myself a radical? Yeah, but I do struggle with...that language because I don't think it's accessible to people who are outside of political movements.

Capitalist cooptation

I6

I think the most dire consequence of the evolution of capitalism today is its capacity for cooptation. It is extremely adept at commodifying and co-opting any sort of movement at all, even the most radical. I think that the reformist strategies, whether they’re NGOs, or unions, or other things….I wouldn't say I reject all of them I would just say that all of those in and of themselves are not sufficient.

Winning over the long haul

I14

What does winning look like? At some point it's a definitive break from capitalism. I don't know...how long that process is. After that break it's not [over], socialism, or anarchism, or whatever we want to call this new utopia we're creating is going to take a really, really long time to develop. Humans need to become entirely re-socialized, we need to start looking at things in very different ways. That's a really long process.